Posted on 12/24/2002 1:18:42 PM PST by sarcasm
First drug dealers, next a wave of illegal immigration, then fear of terrorists--and now the rise of vigilantism. It's just a matter of time until blood is spilled in Cochise or Santa Cruz counties.
This isn't good. Here's Glenn Spencer, chief of the private group American Border Patrol, standing on a lonesome dirt road near the Mexican border, where all his nightmares about the future of America play out, and he's stuck in a keystone moment.
His ATV, one of the vehicles he'll use to prowl terrain like this for so-called illegal immigrants crossing into this country without proper documents, will have to stay tethered to the flatbed. So much for a nifty photo op.
"I brought the wrong key," Spencer says, embarrassed. "It won't start."
Oh, well. Worse things happen in the border wars every day, and besides, the ATV isn't crucial to Spencer's mission.
But cameras and satellites are, and on this day, the 65-year-old tech-head with lots of money and a powerful anger at this human flood, demonstrates it.
His assistant fires up a generator rigged to a satellite on a trailer behind Spencer's truck, and begins videotaping the scene. Spencer's excitement grows.
"This is it. This is what we've demonstrated we can do." He points to the camera. "Right now, this image is being sent up to our satellite link and out onto the Internet.
"My idea is that if people around the country can go online and watch, in real time, illegals walking right into this country, maybe they'll ask why the government doesn't stop it. What's wrong with a little competition for the [U.S.] Border Patrol, right?"
In Spencer's view, this human traffic is overwhelming the country's health care and education systems. It is importing poverty. It allows within our borders an army whose leaders seek nothing less than the takeover by Mexico of the American Southwest.
"Plato said only the dead have seen an end to war," he says. "I think conflict is coming."
Ultimately, he wants to set up videotaping stations from San Diego to Texas, in the belief that outrage will brushfire around the country, forcing change.
Until then, it's Spencer to the rescue. When he talks about why he moved to Sierra Vista this past September from Sherman Oaks, Calif., he sounds like he's leading a cavalry charge.
"I concluded this summer that California was hopeless," he says. "The left has gotten what they want and the open borders policy is causing a meltdown there. I could either cut and run and go fishing in Idaho, or come to the belly of the beast and tackle this problem head-on."
ON ONE POINT, Spencer is undeniably correct, if behind the times. Conflict has already arrived, and it plays out every day in the mountains, in the pastures and along the roads and trails that crisscross the border country of Cochise and Santa Cruz counties.
Residents along this broad frontier report a skyrocketing number of illegals crossing their land, turning their daily lives into nightmares.
Some describe living under almost wartime conditions, with high levels of stress, fear, sleeplessness and especially frustration at the inability of the Border Patrol, or any law enforcement agency, to help them.
Ranchers say they've been howling about this for years. But no one has paid attention.
Reporters who took up the border chaos story viewed it mainly from one angle, hammered over and over again--the sometimes deadly suffering illegals encounter in their treks across the desert.
But now that a few ranchers, after years of frustration, have formed self-defense groups to protect themselves and their property, reporters won't leave them alone.
Suddenly, they find ranchers interesting--but only as vigilantes, men loaded down with Skoal and ammo, so dangerous they merit a Congressional investigation.
Both images--the harmless illegal and the out-of-control cowboy--contain some truth. But not enough. They're cartoon cutouts, easy renderings that frame a complex problem too simply.
Stuck in the middle--angry as hell, with nowhere to turn and wary for the future--ordinary ranchers and border residents, American citizens, try to hang on amid the chaos.
B.J. Kuykendall shares a ranch with her husband, Tommy, 34 miles north of Douglas. It has been in their family for six generations. She's not certain they'll make it to seven.
Her voice shakes with anger as she describes some of what's happened to her.
Illegals have chased her down the road near her home on foot, and used their vehicles to run hers off the road. On four separate occasions, they've piled boulders and debris across the road, apparently efforts to steal her truck.
They've tried to steal her horses, too. Two months ago, Kuykendall found her dog, a mastiff, poisoned with strychnine. The animal suffered for five hours before dying a horrible death, "for the crime of barking."
One of Kuykendall's neighbors found his dog dead, too, its throat slashed. Another has had four dogs poisoned.
"Every day of our lives, every facet of our lives is threatened," says Kuykendall, an ER nurse. "We can't leave here for any length of time because there might be nothing left when we come back. We're afraid of losing everything if this keeps up."
Kuykendall's neighbor, Gary McBride, tells a similar story. In a 100-day period beginning in January, he recorded 101 calls to the Border Patrol to report illegals crossing his property--not counting cell phone calls.
"I can pretty much guarantee that tonight there'll be 40 of them, maybe a hundred, going up the road here to Highway 80. You think anybody's gonna catch them? Nope.
"Night before last I had one hollering at the back door, trying to get in my house. It's unbelievable.
"What burns our butts is that the Border Patrol won't let agents on the ground do their job, and that's damn sure our biggest problem. They get their asses chewed if they make too many arrests because the chiefs don't want big numbers going to the higher ups.
"We don't lie out here. I'll tell you exactly how it is. These Border Patrol chiefs are the sorriest SOBs I've ever seen."
Not all ranchers suffer the same predicament. Some, even those a few miles from the Kuykendalls and McBrides, are largely exempt from these problems by the grace of geography.
Illegals generally avoid wide-open land, preferring the shelter of trees and deep canyons.
But for those who live on heavy crossing routes, whether outside Douglas, to the west in the Huachuca Mountains, or in the Patagonias near Nogales, the story is the same: Water lines cut, cattle gates left open, pastures and canyons full of garbage and human waste.
"They use the canyons as toilets," says Carrol Bercich, who lives near Parker Canyon Lake. "We've got three semi-loads of garbage to haul away right now."
Ranchers also report a change in the illegals they encounter. Five years ago, a group might approach and say, "Excuse us, Señor, could we work for water or food?"
Now, many demand food and water, demand rides and show a profound lack of respect for people and property.
"Every fence they hit they destroy, and that was before they discovered wire cutters," says Anna Magoffin, a Douglas area rancher. "Last year was the worst. We had huge groups, but the destruction, I mean, we still haven't gotten the fences back up. Every acre of the ranch is impacted."
McBride says their level of aggression has increased markedly.
"They make remarks, give you the finger and won't go away," he says. "Sometimes they go into your house and you have to pull guns to get them out."
Numerous ranchers contacted for this story wouldn't speak publicly.
They're afraid of being branded vigilantes and targeted in a possible police investigation on the one hand. And on the other, they fear reprisal by Mexican gangs that operate drug rings and increasingly powerful and nasty people-smuggling rings.
A few ranchers said they've received such threats and are clamming up for good.
Arizona ranchers have always carried guns, mostly for snakes, and to put down injured animals.
But in this siege atmosphere--with law enforcement response times ranging from 20 minutes to forget about it--ranchers now carry weapons for self-defense.
As one said, "Before, maybe a .22 plinker. Now we carry .38s and .357s."
One ranch has a weapons instructor on retainer. The owner requires that employees have a concealed-carry permit, allowing them to keep guns in trucks and other places.
As for the widespread belief that border country is crawling with armed ranchers seeking out illegals, that's more Hollywood than it is reality. The vast majority do precisely the opposite. They do everything they can to avoid them.
"If I see illegals in a ravine, I'll wheel my horse away and call the Border Patrol," says retired Marine general Bud Strom, a Hereford rancher who estimates that a thousand illegals cross his land every week.
"If I see drugs, or what I think are baled backpacks, I might call Customs. I don't have a vigilante mentality and neither do any of my friends."
But when you turn around and find illegals standing in your kitchen, how do you avoid them? When you're a woman alone and you step from the corral and suddenly find yourself surrounded by 35 men, how do you avoid them?
That happened to Kuykendall, who never goes to her corral without a sidearm, a two-way radio and a cell phone.
She quickly called the Border Patrol in Douglas and was told only three ranch patrol agents were on duty, the nearest two hours away.
"Sorry, B.J.," said the supervisor sheepishly.
"They were between me and the house and I couldn't get back there," she says. "I didn't know what they were going to do."
After yelling at them, radioing her husband and making sure they saw her sidearm, which she kept holstered, they retreated.
But with such a volatile mix now pouring across the border--job seekers, drug runners, gun runners and human traffickers, who pull down a reported $30,000 apiece to bring across Asians and Mideasterners--Kuykendall can't know what she'll encounter next.
"A neighbor told me he stepped outside and found 80 Iranians in his backyard," says Kuykendall.
Greg Nicholson, former manager of the Lone Mountain Ranch, which ranges from the Huachucas east almost to the San Rafael Valley, says his ranch used a secret code to communicate with a rancher in Sonora, Mexico.
This rancher, when he saw crossers, would call Lone Mountain headquarters and say, "You've got a red cow out," then identify the canyon by the mile marker. This triggered a call the Border Patrol.
The Mexican rancher had received threats for trying to run off the intruders, and feared traffickers had tapped his phone.
Nicholson spent 10 months at Lone Mountain, but quit over rising concern for his safety, and his family's.
"It's not a legal issue anymore. It's a military issue," says Nicholson. "Whether it's drug runners or illegals, we're being invaded down there."
(Excerpt) Read more at tucsonweekly.com ...
He's not lying,but he IS mistaken. The sorriest SOB's around are the spineless and/or corrupt bastards in the RNC and the White House who not only permit the illegal alien problem to exist,but whose actions even encourage it. All the Border Patrol brass are doing is following the orders of their political masters.
That's not what the Constitution says.
The Federal government was given limited and enumerated powers. Under the Tenth Amendment, powers not granted to the Federal government are reserved to the States or the people.
In the case of Klamath, where does the Constitution, in your opinion, grant the power to the Feds to overrule local law enforcement?
Yes sir. The Constitution is very clear and explicit on where those boundaraies are. The expansion of Federal power via the Commerce Clause has corrupted the Founders' intention of a limited central government.
The 16th and 17th Amendments were drastic mistakes as well, IMO, but at least the Amendment process was the proper way to change the powers of the Federal government.
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;
In addition, only THREE things are recognized by the Constitution as being crimes under general (that is, outside of the areas listed above) FedGov jurisdiction: Piracy, Treason and Counterfeiting. However, deporting illegals could come under their purview, I suppose. The rest of the things FedGov gets into are clearly unconstitutional. Thank God some local sheriffs are getting smart about that sort of thing.
As a Federal LEO, I would have to disagree with you.
First off, I doubt there is any Federal LEO that would risk his or her career or life by attempting to arrest a County Sheriff or any other local LEO that disputed the Feds authority.
In their jurisdiction, the locals pretty much run the show, unless the Feds want to get a court order, or have proof that the local LEO is obstructing justice and interfering with their investigation.
In most cases, both the Feds and the local LEO's know when to concede their authority or know when they have no authority. It all depends on the case and situation.
In the case that Jeff Head described, if those Federal Officers wished to continue their investigation or thought that the Sheriff was obstructing their investigation, they would have just gone and obtained a court order for the Sheriff to cease and desist. They had no authority over the Sheriff at that time and they knew it. If the investigation was worth while, they would have done just that. As it appears that they did not, then the investigation must not have been worth while in the first place.
Debacles like Ruby Ridge and Waco are not isolated events. They happen to be the largest and most publicised. There are many others that occur.
They are endemic of a condition where the Federal component is continuing to gradually exceed its constitutional mandates. What happened at Klamath Falls Oregon with the water situation last year is another large example that did get a lot of press (because a few people were willing to risk all to stand up against it and get the word out) that, thankfully, ended peacefully. It had all the earmarks and potential for ending much worse.
The issue becomes what is considered "lawful" and what is "constitutional". In a condition where judges (like at Klamath) rule abject tyranny to be "lawful" and "constitutional" little room is left but for the people to stand with their local authorities (if they can muster them) against the infingement. When your very livelihood and that of your wives and children hang in the balance ... waiting several years for the issue to be addressed is not an option.
Anyhow. like I said, and as Marine Inspector has pointed out ... the case in Idaho was one where the people stood up with their sheriff and the Federal authorities backed down. If the Feds had tried to "put him down hard" as you infer ... there would have been a civil war. Thank God they understood this and saw that what was being pushed did not warrant or merit that type of reaction.
In the end, all LEO's, both local and federal serve at the request and the allowance of the people. It is something they can not afford to lose sight of. If they turn the large majority of the people against them through such acts as we are speaking of ... then the path is both tragic and horrific to contemplate. But it is one that must not be shirked if we are to avoid potential tyranny. Our founders faced just the same prospects and they provided the example.
No one I know wants that. We all hope and pray such events do not occur ... but vigilance, common sense and history demand that we not lose sight of it.
Look at the credibility on this thread for example . You wont find a better class of people in the current circles that you have now probably .
Not to mention the knowledge they have coupled with deep rooted love & passion for the Republic . Do yourself a favour and get to know these folks or at least read some of the threads they visit .
You will be a better man rest assured .
I agree on both points. There is a balance of power between the States and the Feds, and in the past the Feds have abused it, but the States can and have abused their power also. It's very fine line and it is sometimes hard to stay on the right side.
Roger Barnett was one of several Cochise County residents who testified before Congress three years ago!
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